It’s fair to say that the last few months have been some of the busiest in the history of both VTS and Hightower. As many of you may know, VTS and Hightower merged in November 2016. Since then we’ve been working hard to combine our two companies, including our talent, offices, products, and, our blogs! (if you’re interested, you can read more about the progress we’re making with our migration here.)

The concept of proptech is no longer a new one. In fact, we think it’s fair to say that UK real estate professionals have caught the technology bug. We chatted with Charlie Wade, the UK managing director of VTS, one of the most cutting-edge companies to enter the PropTech scene, to chat about the future of technology in London’s commercial real estate market.

Commercial real estate has historically relied on outdated and disparate systems, using spreadsheets and CRM tools to house mountains of data. But these systems don’t talk to each other. That’s a huge problem causing landlords, brokers and asset managers to waste countless hours digging through multiple systems to answer even one simple question. It also makes it near impossible to see the big picture.

For commercial real estate firms exploring the benefits of platforms and tools hosted in the cloud, information security is top of mind. It’s important to be completely confident the platform you partner with a) has the proper systems and processes in place, and b) these systems are working properly to keep your data protected. While this due diligence process may be common for larger CRE firms with in-house security resources, it’s likely that smaller firms (for which security is not a core competency) won’t be as certain how to approach data protection.